Canada is now just 13 months away from making marijuana a legal drug for recreational consumption. What’s critical to the Trudeau government at this point is to ensure that come July 1st 2018, there will be a sufficient supply of weed on the legal market to meet the sudden rush of demand that’s expected.

So it was not altogether surprising when Health Canada recently announced that it would speed up the licensing process for the production of legal medical weed, in an attempt to ramp up cultivation ahead of next July.

Andre Shavers was sentenced to five years on felony probation after authorities burst into the house where he was living in one of Oakland's most heavily policed neighborhoods and found a quarter ounce of marijuana.

After the 2007 raid, Shavers couldn't leave the state without permission. He was subject to police searches at any time. He walked to the corner store one night for maple syrup and came back in a police car. Officers wanted to search his home again.

All the while, cannabis storefronts flourished elsewhere in a state where medical marijuana was authorized in 1996.

Detroit's crackdown on illegally operating medical marijuana dispensaries has shuttered 167 shops since the city's regulation efforts began last year, and dozens more are expected.

Detroit city attorney Melvin Butch Hollowell said that 283 dispensaries were identified last year, all of which were operating illegally.

"At the time I sent a letter to each one of them indicating that unless you have a fully licensed facility, you are operating at your own risk," he said.

An additional 51 shops are in the pipeline to be closed in the coming weeks, Hollowell said. That would bring the closures up to 218, a step closer to the  goal laid out by officials to only have 50 dispensaries in the city.

The legal weed business is booming in Colorado, and the state has finalized plans to spend its pot tax windfall on health programs in public schools, housing for at-risk populations, and a new treatment program to combat the opioid crisis.

Medical and now recreational marijuana is legal in Nevada. Many businesses in the state are grappling with drafting drug policies to ensure workplace safety. Diana Albiniano is a Reno based human resources consultant with Solutions At Work. She helps employers customize policies that work for their type of industry and explains that workplace drug policies should address the specific needs of an industry.

“Do you have heavy equipment, do you have manufacturing, do you have a lot of safety concerns? So your policy is going to be a lot different than a policy for a company that just has workers in an office,” Albiniano says.

Prohibition Gold's line of powdered, THC dissolvables take the mess out of marijuana edibles while offering a squeaky clean alternative to weed culture. But in sweeping away the realities of criminalized cannabis, do they go too far?

A woman holds a martini glass between her fingertips, her skin aglow in the camera's flash, the edges of her evening dress and matching jet-black hair lost against the dim, cocktail-lounge light.

"Devilishly Good Fun," reads the distressed saloon lettering to her left—words made official with a wax seal of a devil wielding a pitchfork.

France will introduce a new law by the end of the year to soften punishments for cannabis use, officials say.

The legislation, a key promise of President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, will end prison terms for marijuana consumers.

But the changes will stop short of decriminalising use of the drug, according to government spokesman Christophe Castaner.

France is one of half-a-dozen countries in the EU that still criminalises cannabis use, in contrast to Portugal.

Israel’s new cannabis decriminalization policy, approved by the government in March, officially came into effect on Sunday, commencing a new legal approach towards the recreational use of marijuana in the Jewish state.

The new government policy shifts the responsibility of enforcing marijuana laws from police to civil authorities. Yet recreational cannabis use is not fully legalized in Israel, and the Israel Police clarified that “even under the new enforcement policy, cannabis use will stay illegal in the public sector,” reported Yedioth Ahronoth.

Cannabis legalization comes in multiple phases. At least that has been my experience living in Oregon where we voted to legalize cannabis for adult use in 2014.

Many people think that just because a legalization initiative is passed on election day that the fight is over. But the reality is that the battle goes on, just in different ways.

Every single cannabis legalization initiative that has passed in America was not perfect. All of them can and should be improved upon.

One facet of legalization that most states missed was social cannabis use provisions. Cannabis clubs and businesses allowing on-site cannabis use are still prohibited in almost all of the United States.

Canada plans to legalize recreational cannabis before July 1, 2018, and the industry continues to steal headlines as this has created great opportunity for both companies and investors.

Although the opportunity is significant, the process of becoming a licensed medical cannabis producer is very lengthy and expensive. These factors have resulted in the country having a supply and demand issue for the medical cannabis market.